[HN Gopher] On the State of the Web
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On the State of the Web
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 70 points
Date : 2023-07-03 18:39 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (manuelmoreale.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (manuelmoreale.com)
| kreutz wrote:
| Reddit is a glorified bulletin board that does not need ~2000
| employees to operate and iterate. The community is their product.
| They are were never going to be a unicorn and they will die
| trying. Software eats the world but Silicon Valley manages to
| find a way to kill off its own creation.
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| > Reddit is a glorified bulletin board
|
| and uber (ride) is an automatic taxi dispatch, it's ok.
|
| > Software eats the world but Silicon Valley manages to find a
| way to kill off its own creation
|
| I blame capitalism.
|
| digital stuff and capitalism do not mix well. something's gotta
| give.
|
| but I guess I can also blame digital stuff (the internet);
| something will give. but which? and what? ....and when???
| omnimus wrote:
| This is the case with most of these. Having big, popular, very
| profitable website is not enough. They are going to break them
| all. Good maybe if the VCs get annyoed it will finally allow
| for healthy ecosystem to emerge.
| riwsky wrote:
| *not at all profitable
| mkl95 wrote:
| > They are were never going to be a unicorn and they will die
| trying.
|
| Reddit are valued at ~5bn, which makes them a full-blown
| unicorn. But in 2023 the gap between a unicorn and an IPO-ready
| company can be huge.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Unrelated but shouldn't we adjust the unicorn definition?
| Everything is increasing thanks to inflation so we should
| make the unicorn title more expensive.
|
| I'm half joking obviously but the 1B valuation doesn't seem
| all that rare anymore.
|
| Maybe 10B?
| nighthawk454 wrote:
| "valued at" may be the metric, but I think the bigger point
| here is they're unprofitable and have not much path to either
| fix that or continue 'growing'. So by monopoly money rules
| yes they're a valuable unicorn, but realistically it's more
| like time to pay the piper.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes. Whenever I hear that a company (or a person) is
| "valued at" something, I know that number that follows is
| not likely to bear any relationship with reality.
| mistermann wrote:
| What could these 2,000 people possibly be doing behind the
| scenes? Reddit essentially never releases new user facing
| features, so what is everyone up to?
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| whstl wrote:
| They seem to be constantly redesigning the website. For me,
| there are two versions of the "new design": one for listing,
| another for the post itself... one is black and the other
| blue. Every other week there's something slightly different
| or a bit broken. The latest change for me was that I can't
| collapse posts anymore in the new version. Since I don't
| really use much, I just end up in reddit.com instead of
| old.reddit.com...
|
| (EDIT: Scratch that, when I actually log in there seems to be
| a THIRD layout!!!)
|
| There's also the mobile apps that still seem to get weekly
| (?) releases, all with the same copy-paste changelog (at
| least in my language). Don't know if something really
| changed, I don't use it.
|
| The overall quality of course is terrible (at least for the
| site).
|
| But that's completely expected when the number of developers
| is that large. Developer headcount doesn't scale linearly to
| delivered work. At some point you can keep adding people and
| it will only make things slower. :/
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Complaining about the state of the web is like complaining that
| the radio only plays crap songs, that TV only has reality soaps,
| or that McDonald's food is not nutritious or tasty. At some point
| you have to realize that this is how it is always going to be in
| the mainstream, and seek out quality content outside the
| mainstream. Instead of being mad that the quality content isn't
| in the mainstream. There's more high quality content online than
| ever before, if you're willing to lift your pinky finger a
| millionth of an inch and make some effort to find it - or God
| forbid pay a little for it.
| namaria wrote:
| Two or three generations of a pattern don't make it universal.
| Manorial servitude dominated European economy for nearly five
| centuries.
| dynamorando wrote:
| Would it make sense if NPR ran a Mastodon instance?
|
| EDIT: or if public universities ran their own instances? All
| content submitted by users would be CC licensed.
|
| EDIT EDIT: To keep costs down, just rate limit the number of
| posts that could be made per user.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think nobody wants to deal with the issue of moderating for
| the random members of the general public, other than
| surveillance-capitalism organizations like Google and Reddit.
|
| I could see a university hosting a Mastodon instance for their
| own students, though. Moderation is probably a little easier if
| you have the person's real name.
| duxup wrote:
| Does NPR want to get into the moderation business at scale of
| their instance becomes popular?
|
| Or is this just their own instance where nobody else can
| participate?
| no_wizard wrote:
| A closer to staff only instance for news orgs makes a ton of
| sense actually, if you see it as a feed and not an
| interaction platform, which despite everyone claiming Twitter
| was a way for bi-directional communication I see scant
| evidence that the average journalist engages with their
| audience directly in the way one imagines, it's mostly fire
| and forget tweets anyway, perfect for Mastodon
| duxup wrote:
| I'm wonder how much use such sites are outside a sort of
| glorified RSS feed.
|
| Not that they can be replaced with RSS, but a lot of use
| seems nearly just that.
| xnx wrote:
| I often think about what a "public access" web would look like
| (similar to "public access" TV that exists in some US cable
| markets).
| dynamorando wrote:
| This seems to make sense; we have public parks, why can't we
| have public spaces online?
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I think this makes a great deal of sense, for any organization
| that wants a feed-type social media presence.
|
| The fly in the ointment is DDOS protection. That might not be a
| problem in some cases, but once you attract enough attention
| you become a peachy target.
| dynamorando wrote:
| NPR Mastadon instance: sponsored by Cloudflare
| riwsky wrote:
| _cries in RSS_
| lolinder wrote:
| You can follow any Mastodon account with RSS:
|
| https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456
| z3t4 wrote:
| We need to get better at connecting with each others. The press
| revolutionized organizations as it made it possible for few
| people to organize a large group of people. We now have the
| Internet where anyone can communicate with anyone else. We no
| longer need a hierarchical structure with generals and captains
| telling people what to do. We can solve any problem more
| effectively by just communicating among each other.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I feel mostly the same about the web (and have kept blogging
| regardless of audience, discoverability, hype, etc.). I'm not an
| idealist to the point where I believe we will wind back the clock
| to before Google Reader was shut down and social networking
| became a rampant grab for eyeballs, but I like to find places
| where things are still original, even if few and far between.
| fferen wrote:
| I've been using Cloudhiker lately to replace the good old
| stumbleupon days and it does capture some of the magic of the old
| web. (not affiliated)
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| This is neat, I didn't know about it. I maintain a site that's
| similar in spirit: https://theforest.link/
|
| A lot of weird and quirky websites in there.
| seydor wrote:
| If you want the web make it easy to monetize and do accounting
| for small websites. Else you get megasilos
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Agree. But also, some things don't need to be monetized. We can
| have small forums and small communities online just because we
| like them. We're happy to pay for our other hobbies and running
| a forum with a few hundreds users doesn't cost all that much.
| [deleted]
| seydor wrote:
| Then you end up resenting it after some times has passed and
| you re no longer interested but you re pressured by users to
| keep the website up. That's unsustainable and ugly
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Well in that case you figure out if someone else wants to
| pick up the torch. And if no one wants to do it then you
| let things go. And that's also ok.
| nektro wrote:
| I think this is the post that put me over the edge
| https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7076790...
|
| > Anjali SudAnjali Sud, CEO of Vimeo
|
| > [...] Yes our new tools leverage AI (because duh, we're in
| 2023).
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Well to be fair he has to do it and has to say that. Otherwise
| he will be seeming to have missed the boat... but yes this AI
| stuff getting a bit out of hand now.
| samcgraw wrote:
| > You can still set up your tiny quiet corner on the web, do your
| own things, and connect slowly with other people
|
| This is exactly what I've been after with my side projects.
| Thanks for the encouragement to continue even when things are
| slow-going, makes me remember it's a feature not a bug.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I just wish there was some way to have a web site open to the
| public without having its contents used to train AI models.
| That threat has basically removed the web as a means for me to
| share and connect with people over common interests.
| BudaDude wrote:
| Honest question, why does it matter? If we exclude ClosedAI,
| wouldn't an open source LLM trained on real web data benefit
| everyone?
| JohnFen wrote:
| It matters a great deal to me because I think that LLMs
| present an unacceptable societal risk. I want nothing to do
| with helping to improve them, even a little, because I view
| that as harming people.
|
| Whether or not it's open source (and whether or not it's
| OpenAI doing it) doesn't affect the problems I have with
| it.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| The slowness and small scale it is definitely a feature and not
| a bug.
|
| You have time to actually interact with other people, you can
| engage with them at a more personal level.
|
| I have slow email interactions that have moved from emails to
| actual mails where messages take weeks to arrive and it's
| glorious.
|
| It's also an extremely kind environment, at least it is for me.
| It's the entire opposite of most social media.
| zerojames wrote:
| The IndieWeb is a nice corner of the web where you can find
| people with whom to chat about tech, the web, and many other
| things! https://indieweb.org/discuss
| kokanee wrote:
| huh I clicked around for a while and I like the vibe but I
| can't find any directory or feed of pages/projects to
| explore; it looks like it's all documentation and chat rooms
| for developers. Is there a way to browse the indie web as a
| consumer rather than a developer?
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Unfortunately, the indie web is very, very dev oriented.
| That's because people who care about having personal
| websites are more often than not developers and they like
| to talk about development. And as a result of that you get
| a ton of web related content.
|
| But there's also something else. As mentioned in another
| post I maintain a list of weird links you can browse at
| random if you want to do some browsing
| https://theforest.link/
|
| I try to include sites that are "different" and I also try
| to avoid having too much dev oriented content. But I warn
| you that you might stumble on some weird content.
| masswerk wrote:
| > we can't just have an entire world of sites and services all
| available for free with just a few ads slapped on top of them
|
| Arguably, advertising on the Web is too cheap and too ubiquitous.
| This may be even the key problem. As a reminder, before this, a
| select, smaller number of media like newspapers, magazines, even
| TV, was able to sustain itself by advertising with consumer
| prices only contributing to a minor part of the overall costs of
| production and distribution. (The peak in revenues from this
| actually isn't that long ago: 2008/2009.) The current model of
| ubiquitous, but also infinitesimal small prices & revenues, plays
| only to the brokers, while sustaining nothing.
| skilled wrote:
| It's tough life out here for developers who're so plugged into
| the matrix of the actual Web that you can't overlook how
| condensed and bland it has become. But stating the obvious
| doesn't really help or do anything. I think if people genuinely
| feel this way then what is needed are solutions.
|
| There's actually quite a lot of psychology involved in this whole
| debate/situation, but my gut tells me that people don't even want
| to listen to that. It's just a weird phase for everyone - there
| is an overflow of garbage on the web that is designed to
| manipulate you and talk to you as if we are two different
| species.
|
| Look what StackOverflow is doing now also - it's literally
| ruining a great Internet community (intense as it is) because
| their hand has been forced by people who pay the bills. And
| because nobody could foresee the future, perhaps things didn't
| seem like they would end up this bad. But they have.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| What's stack overflow doing?
| skilled wrote:
| > Moderation Strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently
| ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425000/moderation-s.
| ..
|
| > Starting the Prompt Design Site: A New Home in our Stack
| Exchange Neighborhood
|
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/390463/starting-
| the...
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Seems like its also slowly loosing its way.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| > I think if people genuinely feel this way then what is needed
| are solutions.
|
| I personally think the solutions, from a technical stand point,
| are already there. What we need are intentions and solid
| motivations.
|
| The reason why more people are not running personal sites,
| blogs, digital gardens or any other sort of truly personal web
| space is not for lack of technical solutions.
|
| But it's hard to make non dev people to realize what's possible
| out there on the web.
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